Thus, when I am sometimes described as an 'electronic composer,'  I smile at what seems an oxymoron: a human organism electronically connected to and controlled by a machine.  That description confuses the way I explore materials and modes of making music with its substance.  On the other hand, electrons certainly do flow through my musics...charged particles outside the atom's nucleus...a metaphorical model for my work with electroacoustic and computer music since 1964 and, conceptually, since I composed my first piece in 1948.  These 'electrons of music' fascinate and surprise me with their beautiful complexity and vast range of sonic possibilities: they fuse my hybrid creations, smooth my mixtures of idioms, make transparent my interplay with media, deftly reconcile my open and set forms, improvise with my improvisers, change continually or remain the same, dramatize or existentialize.  Electrons forever!"

Larry Austin (b. 1930, Oklahoma) was educated in Texas and California, studying with Canadian composer Violet Archer (UNT), French composer Darius Milhaud (Mills), and American composer Andrew Imbrie (UCB).  He also enjoyed extended associations in California in the 'sixties with composers John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and David Tudor.  Highly successful as a composer for traditional as well as experimental music genres, Austin's works have been performed and recorded by the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, the National Symphony orchestras, as well as many others in North America and Europe.  Since 1964, he has composed more than eighty-five works incorporating electroacoustic and computer music media: combinations of tape, instruments, voices, orchestra, live-electronics and real-time computer processing, as well as solo audio and video compositions.  Austin has received numerous commissions, grants and awards, his works widely performed and recorded, including the 1994 premiere performance and recording by the Cincinnati Philharmonia of Austin's complete realization of Charles Ives's transcendental Universe Symphony (1911-51), that performance followed at the 1995 Warsaw Autumn Festival by the National Philharmonic of Warsaw and, in May, 1998, a festival performance in Saarbrucken, Germany, by the Rundfunksinfonie Orchester Saarbrucken, that performance recorded and released on col legno records.   In 1996, Austin was awarded the prestigious Magistere (Magisterium) prize/title in the 23rd International Electroacoustic Music Competition, Bourges, France, for his work BluesAx (1995-96), for saxophonist and tape/electronics, and for his work and influential leadership in electroacoustic music genres through the past forty years.  Austin was the first US composer to receive the Magistere.  From 1958 to 1972 Austin was a member of the music faculty of the University of California, Davis, active there as a conductor, performer, and composer.  There, in 1966, he co-founded, edited, and published the seminal new music journal, SOURCE: Music of the Avant Garde (soon to be published in book form by the University of California Press, and its six Source Records to be released on a three-cd-set by Pogus Records).  Subsequently, he served on the faculties of the University of South Florida, 1972-78, and the University of North Texas, 1978-96, founding and directing extensive computer music studios at both universities.  In 1986 he co-founded and continues as president of CDCM: Consortium to Distribute Computer Music, producer of the CDCM Computer Music Series on Centaur Records, with thirty-seven compact disc volumes released since 1988.  On the Board of Directors of the International Computer Music Association, Austin served as its president, 1990-94.  Retiring from his 38-year academic career in 1996, Austin resides with his wife Edna, of fifty-five years, at their home in Denton, Texas.  Working in and out of his Denton studio, gaLarry, Austin continues his active composing career with commissions, tours, performances, recordings, writings, and lecturing, anticipating future extended composer residencies in North America, Asia, and Europe.

Of Austin's piece to be performed at SEAMUS 2009, he writes: "Tableaux: Convolutions on a Theme (2003), for alto saxophone, octophonic computer music, and video, was commissioned for performance by saxophonist and Distinguished Research Professor Stephen Duke with funding from the Graduate School of Northern Illinois University. The piece unfolds in three continuous sections: convolutions, improvisations, and remixes. The soloist's sounds are amplified, processed, and diffused in the listening space, combined with the synchronized computer playback of octophonic computer music heard in a three-dimensional montage: the audience is surrounded and immersed in the live and recorded sounds, at the same time viewing a dvd video created specially for Tableaux by video artist Kevin Evensen and entitled Look at that Sky.

All of the sonic materials for Tableaux originated from Duke's saxophone recordings made at a spring, 2003, session produced by the composer at DRM Productions, Dallas, Texas, with David Rosenblad as recording engineer. Through a process of pairing Duke's recordings, using one sound recording as the 'primary input' file and a second recording as the 'impulse response' file, the 'convolution' process multiplies the waveform spectra of the two files together, producing a third, hybrid soundfile. The effect is a type of cross-synthesis, in which the common frequencies are reinforced. To the composer's ears, provocatively beautiful, ethereal sounds result: tableaux sonore...sonic images...passing before our ears.

The "convolutions on a theme" are all based on a familiar theme and its harmonization composed originally as part of a 19th century composer's piano work, later brilliantly orchestrated by a twentieth century composer. Now, a 21st century composer elaborates. The conception and realization of Tableaux is orchestral, in great part because the hybrid, convolved sounds and the way they emerge in the texture of the piece are like flutes, trumpets, oboes, and strings interacting and gently resounding. The saxophonist blends his/her lines and sounds with the computer music, whose essences derive from the sixteen composed and transcribed sequences heard in combination and succession through the course of the piece. Tableaux was completed during spring-fall, 2003, in the composer's studio, gaLarry, in Denton, Texas, USA." 

http://www.music.unt.edu/cemi/larry_austin/